REX/Shutterstock “So far it’s been an absolutely charmed first two weeks,'” Lethal Weapon developer/executive producer/showrunner Matt Miller told Deadline Thursday night about shooting the upcoming third season of Fox’s Lethal Weapon. In an interview with Deadline during the Fox TCA party, he gave more details about new co-star Seann William Scott’s character, talked about how the character will be introduced in the Season 3 premiere and shared the wild story of how Scott was cast.
Season 3 features a revamped leading duo of returning star Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh, joined by a new character played by Seann William Scott. The American Pie alum replaced original co-lead Clayne Crawford (Martin Riggs) who was let go over on-set behavior issues.
As Deadline revealed last week, Scott’s character’s name will be Wesley Cole. His last name is an homage to a memorable character in the movie franchise, Lorna Cole, played by Rene Russo in the third and fourth film. But that’s as far as any parallels go, Miller said.
The impetus for the Wesley Cole character came from an article in the New Yorker Miller had read around the time the turmoil on Lethal Weapon was happening this past spring. “It was about a CIA agent who had served overseas in Iraq and had became very disillusioned,” Miller said. “He came back and became a cop but his philosophy as a cop was not to run in and shoot people, take down bad guys. What he was looking to do is always defuse the situations as opposed to escalate them.”
Wesley Cole was created with two goals, to be different from Riggs but still serve as the show’s “lethal weapon.”
After Lethal Weapon had wrapped production on its second season, Miller had taken his family to Paris where they rented an apartment. They had been there for awhile when the situation on the Warner Bros. TV-produced show came to a head in May.
“I was talking to Fox and Warner Bros., and it was a bit of a moving target,” Miller said. He dismissed reports that there were a lot of offers to other actors before Scott was cast.
“There really were not, it was almost none,” he said. “it was a conversation we all had, myself, Warner Bros. TV and Fox. Seann had gone in and had pitched a show that day. They were like, ‘he looks really good, what about Seann?’ I said, ‘That’s a really interesting idea’. Because I knew that he had such a different energy from Clayne, there would be no way they would occupy the same space.”
